Cellular communication systems are used by many throughout the world to communicate. Successive generations of cellular communication systems have been developed and deployed with new-generation systems providing for the performance of increasingly data-intensive communication services. Additional communication systems have been developed and deployed that share some of the characteristics of cellular communication systems. Wireless Local Area Networks and WiFi networks, e.g., also provide for multi-user communications by way of radio air interfaces.
A cellular communication system is a bandwidth-constrained system. That is to say, only a limited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is allocated to a cellular communication system for communications. Other radio communication systems also are generally bandwidth-constrained. Due to the limited bandwidth that is typically available for communications, communication capacity is sometimes constrained by this limitation. When so-limited, efficient utilization of the allocated bandwidth is essential to maximize best the communication capacity of the communication system. And, efforts are regularly made to increase the efficiency by which the allocated bandwidth is utilized.
Recent attention has been directed, for instance, towards interference coordination to facilitate uplink communications, i.e., communications by mobile stations to network parts of a communication system. By providing interference coordination, improved communication throughput is possible. And, also significantly, interference coordination provides for the reduction of interference that is experienced during the performance of a communication service. A participant in such a communication service is provided with an improved communication experience.
Existing schemes that provide interference coordination, however, exhibit various deficiencies. The existing schemes do not adequately take into account the dynamic nature of a cellular communication system and the dynamic nature of the uplink interference. Some schemes utilize a static time domain representation of the uplink interference. For instance, in one scheme, four categories are defined at a cell. A mobile station that operates within the cell is grouped into one of the four categories. A resource allocation strategy is provided by which to allocate the mobile stations to different ones of the resource groups, i.e., categories. In another scheme, efforts are made to avoid uplink interference by allocated frequency resources to mobile stations positioned at cell edges. Information exchange between eNBs has also been proposed to facilitate the allocation of the dedicated frequency resource. At least one mechanism has been proposed that takes into account overload information at an X2 interface. However, in this proposed scheme, the update rate is slow, and variation of distribution of uplink interference is inadequately traced.
Existing proposals, therefore, generally fail properly to take into account a time domain update. And, existing schemes fail to provide properly for uplink interference coordination.
An improved manner by which to provide for uplink interference coordination is therefore needed.
It is in light of this background information related to communications in a radio communication system that the significant improvements of the present invention have evolved.